


The Key Is Under the Plantain Leaf

by sutlers



Category: Matilda - Roald Dahl
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:40:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sutlers/pseuds/sutlers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The house, when Matilda leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Key Is Under the Plantain Leaf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [youreyesaregems](https://archiveofourown.org/users/youreyesaregems/gifts).



The house was quiet with Matilda gone; Jenny hadn't realized how much she depended on her to fill up the empty spaces. The cottage had been quiet too, but that was different—there was only so much quiet to be had in a place like that, with the birds singing outside, the lorries up the road making their morning deliveries, the kettle rattling on the stove. Small sounds filling up small places, reflected by the chalky white of the walls. Here halls were long and the walls papered in the deepest green, a delicate stylized swirl of flowers and leaves; in other places burgundy with violet accents, and still in others gray and blue like the troubled sea. They swallowed sounds, swallowed stains, revealing nothing but faint discolorations in hidden places most people don't know to look for.

Before Matilda, Agatha had replaced the portrait of Jenny's father above the mantle with one of herself, stern and enormous in vivid oil and mahogany. Within a day of Matilda moving in it had disappeared and Jenny's father was back in his rightful place: "Magnus," Jenny said now, trying the name out, noting her father's physical similarities to his sister in the shape of his eyes, the unyielding curve of his mouth. "Magnus," she said again, hearing the peculiar way the word fell flat, due to acoustics.

***

Sometimes Jenny wondered if Matilda remembered what she had once been able to do. They had never mentioned it again but Jenny lived with it every day; literally lived with it, had a place to sleep and food to eat because of a five-year-old girl who had once been able to perform miracles. It seemed ludicrous now, impossible, that a glass of water and a bit of chalk had managed to change so much. To change so little.

***

Jenny had never told Matilda that she had meant to sell the house before Matilda's parents buggered off to Spain; she made the call first thing, after the ambulance had rolled away and she'd found a moment, away from the shocked buzz of everyone's good fortune. "It's a lovely property," the estate agent had said. "Beautifully maintained. Just tremendous. You will get an excellent price." Jenny hadn't needed the money but thought it would have been nice to maybe rent a flat for a couple of hundred pounds a month, something small and easy to take care of, a new little bit of freedom.

The house had been tolerable with Matilda there because Matilda had made it her own, chemistry experiments exploded in the kitchen, papers full of formulae scattered all over the sitting room, precarious towers of books stacked in every available corner.

Matilda had said it made her feel like Mary Lennox, exploring hallways full of secrets and sadness. The metaphor wasn't perfect; there were still places Jenny refused to set foot: the cellar, smelling of damp earth and decay, the second bedroom on the east end, the gardens on the grounds where Agatha liked to perform her morning regimen, scattered with rusting iron and rotting leather. She employed a cleaning service and once a week two women came to dust and tidy all of the unused rooms; "A waste, a waste," she sometimes heard them tell each other, "these people who have so much, they never appreciate it."

 _Give my Jenny back her house_ the message on the chalkboard had said, as if the house belonged to her, as if it were that simple—maybe for Matilda it was. Matilda, who has no real conception of what it means to be afraid.

***

Hunger, a vicious ache in her belly, had been easy, as had the cold—it was living under siege that had been awful, being trapped, unable to work out how to get free. Most people don't know that courage is a finite resource, something that can be work away, one step forward and two steps back. It was always easier to be brave for other people.

***

Jenny doesn't remember much about her mother, only the small kindnesses, soft hands, sweets after dinner. It was through her mother that Jenny related to her father; after her mother’s death her father didn’t know what to do, baffled by this small life that was completely dependent on him. She came across the term in her reading years later— _benign neglect_ —thought that was a terrible way to put it, a terrible name for the visible relief her father felt to be able to give the responsibility of her to someone else.

 _Don't be absurd, Jenny_ , was what her father said the once she decided to say something, standing stiff as a board with her hands clasped behind her back in front of his massive oaken desk while he peered at her over his reading. _It's absurd,_ Jenny had told a weeping second-former, huddled together in the tall grass, _the things that people can get away with doing to each other_.

Agatha had appropriated the desk for her office at the school and Mr Trilby sat behind it now, corpulent and pleased, oblivious of its provenance. Occasionally he offered Jenny tea and they talked about his wife, his dogs, the budget, the curriculum, everything that was not the cement-filled closet on the other side of the room, papered over. _Why were we so helpless,_ Jenny wanted to ask, but didn't; it was no use returning to the subject, anyway.

***

When she was thirteen, Matilda was accepted into Cambridge, Oxford, ETH Zurich, Copenhagen, ENS Paris, the Australian National University, Harvard, MIT, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Tokyo. Jenny got the acceptance letters in the mail, gathered them together and on Friday spread them all out on the dinner table, looking at the postmarks, feeling "the edges of her world dropping away. Matilda came home, and when she saw the thin explosion of colored paper against the dark wood grain her face lit up and she pulled Jenny into an impromptu dance, spinning across the tiles.

"I feel as though I could go anywhere, Miss Honey," she said, dodging her book bag. "See everything. Oh, you should come with me."

"They're your letters, dearest," Jenny said, tugging her hands free and going to fetch the whistling teapot. "I'm quite all right here."


End file.
